Word: frontier
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...introduction to Pioneer Women, by Joanna Stratton '76, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. recalls the iron-gray Auntie Em of The Wizard of Oz, the sexless and colorless lady of the Kansas plains who has come to represent the withered frontier woman in the minds of childhood readers. The transformation of Dorothy's maternal surrogate, one of the more familiar passages of the beloved novel, goes like this...
...Stratton's recent discovery of hundreds of memoirs from the women who settled the western wilderness against great odds in the mid-19th century has unveiled a female frontier population which seemed to strengthen and thrive and gain color from the prairie sun and wind. These women, who trailed west after their husbands, unwillingly at first, soon burst out in lively appreciation of and identification with the frontier landscape. Carrie Stearns Smith, one pioneer woman, recollects the liberating power of the prairie as it accosted her constricted New England sensibility...
Firearms have achieved in the U.S. a strange sort of inevitability-the nation's gun-ridden frontier heritage getting smokily mingled now with a terror of accelerating criminal violence and a sense that as the social contract tatters, the good guys must have their guns to defend themselves against the rising tribes of bad guys. It is very hard to persuade the good guys that all those guns in their hands wind up doing more lethal harm to their own kind than to the animals they fear; that good guys sometimes get drunk and shoot other good guys...
...been almost 90 years since the historian Frederick Jackson Turner propounded his famous thesis about the end of the American frontier. But the worst part of the frontier never did vanish. Its violence, once tolerable in the vast spaces, has simply backed up into modern America, where it goes on blazing away...
Americans are reared with a commitment to individual liberty and freedom. But the U.S. was forged in a frontier spirit of cooperation and collective enterprise that was as simple and forthright as a barn-raising. Western thinkers from John Locke to Oliver Wendell Holmes believe that individuality at some point has to give ground to group needs. It has taken a successful country on the rim of Asia to remind the U.S. that teamwork, however it is organized, is still the prerequisite for a prosperous society. -By Christopher Byron. Reported by S. Chang and Edwin M. Reingold/Tokyo